updated 08:25 pm EST, Tue February 14, 2012

Inkling Habitat aims to compete with iBooks

Inkling is set to launch its free e-book publishing platform that aims to compete with Apple's iBooks. The platform, known as Inkling Habitat, enables users to publish cloud-based interactive e-books complete with embedded HD videos and 3D content.

"Apple spent a year and a half to build eight textbooks," Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis said, according to quotes in a MocoNewsreport. "In two years, we've built 200."

The books are published to a native iPad app and via HTML5 on the web, ensuring compatibility with other mobile and desktop browsers. Updates are pushed through both avenues simultaneously, while teams of authors and collaborators can work on projects from anywhere.

The company is currently inviting authors and publishers to participate in a limited 'early adopter' program, with full availability scheduled for later this year.

Great news, but

this program will not produce ebooks that sell on Kindle or the iBookstore (et al), so it's of limited use to serious authors and publishers. Still, it can make an iPad app, and that's at least something that will help.

The minute Apple announced iBooks Author I knew it was going to trigger a race to make ebook creation easier than the existing solutions (where Adobe has, quite surprisingly, really dropped the ball on this so far). I welcome tools that further these possibilities but would still like to see something like iBook Author, but would output ePub 3 files. I doubt such a tool will ever be free like iBooks Author is, but it would be well worth it to get that level of functionality.